SPH Alum Heads Google.org

In the late 1960s, a pair of newlyweds from Michigan moved to San Francisco and joined
a commune. He had recently finished medical school and was doing his internship, she
was in law school. It was the era of Timothy Leary and the Grateful Dead, civil rights
and flower power, and the couple got swept up in the ethos of the time. They took
part in marches, spoke out for Native American rights, and helped make a movie about
a tribe of hippies.

With the money they’d earned from the film they flew to London with a group of their friends, bought a bus, painted it psychedelic colors, and drove to India.
They wanted to help flood victims in cyclone-stricken Bangladesh. But they were turned away, and so they drove north to the Himalayas. They later joined an ashram
and took up with a guru whom they called Maharaj-ji. The man and the woman took on
new names. She became Girija, meaning “daughter of the mountains”; he became Subrahmanyan, meaning “filled with brilliance.”

A year passed, and their guru told them to go out into the world and do good. Specifically,
he commanded them to join the United Nations campaign to vanquish smallpox. The man
and woman spent the next six years traversing India, enduring floods and drought,
sickness and fatigue. They and their colleagues searched India’s 575,721 villages
and 2,641 cities for hidden cases of the killer disease. When they were finished,
smallpox had been eradicated. It was the first of their good works.

If you sense an epic quality to the story of Larry and Girija Brilliant, it’s not your imagination. In their relatively young lives—he’s now 62, she’s 61—
they have wrought good on a Homeric scale. They’ve helped rid the earth of smallpox
and are supporting efforts to eradicate polio. They have helped restore sight to millions
in parts of the world where hope is scarce. They have contributed to the health and
cultural vitality of native communities across the United States, and they’ve labored
to reduce the burden of poverty and disease in Latin America. When a catastrophic
tsunami struck southeast Asia two years ago, Larry Brilliant flew to the region at
once and spent several months living and working in refugee camps in Sri Lanka and
Indonesia. A year later he helped conduct polio vaccinations in the Indian province
of Uttar Pradesh, which he says “must be the most difficult place in the world to
work.”

But he’s no ascetic. He and Girija live in California’s affluent Marin County and
have sent their three children to top-flight American universities (including Michigan,
where daughter Iris is a freshman). Larry Brilliant co-founded one of the first online
communities and has run several high-tech companies. He’s long since exchanged the
ashram whites and Hindu moniker of his twenties for a BlackBerry and cell phone—which
he carries with him even on the golf course. Equally at home in rural Africa and Silicon
Valley, he jokes that he has a “multiple-personality disorder, mild and functional.”

That personality—a blend of 1960s idealism, 1990s entrepreneurship, and 21st-century
technological know-how—has led Brilliant to explore nontraditional solutions to some
of the world’s most intractable problems, including infectious disease and global
warming. It’s also led to his new job as executive director of Google.org, the $1+
billion philanthropic arm of Internet giant Google. Literally thousands voiced interest
in the position when it was first announced in 2005, but Brilliant alone had what
the company was looking for. “There were a lot of people out there with passion to
change the world, but there aren’t a lot of people out there with the proven ability
to change the world,” said Sheryl Sandberg, the Google vice president who led the
search.

“I think it’s a stroke of genius on Google’s part,” says UM School of Public Health
Professor Emeritus Fred Munson, who first met Brilliant in the 1970s, when both were
faculty members at Michigan. “I can’t imagine a person who has a better nose for how
to spend money wisely—throwing great chunks of money at something in order to really
make a difference.”

Brilliant’s long-time friend Ram Dass, the Harvard psychology professor who worked
with Timothy Leary and later became a spiritual leader, agrees that Google was “very
very lucky” to land Brilliant—“because he doesn’t bend for power or money, and that’s
a job that would be a catastrophe with somebody bending for money and power.”

To put it another way, Larry Brilliant now has a new stage on which to carry out the
charge his guru laid before him decades ago: “What God gives you is his gift to you,
what you give others is your gift to God.” Forty years after the Summer of Love, Dr.
Brilliant is still hoping to heal the planet.

The steel and glass headquarters of Google sprawl across acres of manicured land in Mountain View, California, in the heart
of high-tech America. Inside the lobby of one of the corporation’s many buildings,
a scrolling list of words in dozens of languages is projected on the wall. Each word
is a Google search from somewhere in the world—a graphic demonstration of the company’s
reach. Upstairs in his sunny corner office, Larry Brilliant displays his own legacy
of global reach: snapshots of his early days with Girija in India, images of Hindu
gods, a photograph of himself putting drops in a child’s mouth.

Dressed in his trademark black shirt, Brilliant winds up his latest meeting, hugs
its participants good-bye, and ushers in his next appointment. Getting on his calendar
these days is a feat. Since becoming executive director of Google.org in Feb-ruary,
he’s been to Asia, Africa, and Europe and has met with the leaders of most of America’s
major philanthropic organizations, including the multibillion-dollar Bill and Melinda
Gates Found-ation, where William Foege, Brilliant’s mentor in the UN’s smallpox campaign
in India, is the senior fellow in the Global Health Program.

Foege, in fact—the recipient of the UM’s first-ever Thomas Francis Jr. Medal in Global
Health—came up with the system for eradicating smallpox by quarantining whole villages
to contain outbreaks. Brilliant is quick to give Foege all due credit for the smallpox
campaign. “He was doing it, and I showed up,” Brilliant remembers. “I was 26, meaning
I was a kid. Bill showed me my first case of smallpox, so I wouldn’t say we were doing
it together—I would say that he taught me everything I know.”

Brilliant is equally quick to note that by comparison to the Gates Foundation, Google.org
is “modest,” but it nonetheless represents “a phenomenal opportunity to do good,”
he says, “to do great good.” What’s more, Bill Gates waited 25 years before setting
up his tax-exempt foundation, while Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin set
up Google.org just six years after starting their company. They funded the charity
by pledging 1% of Google’s annual profit and 1% of its stock, valued in early 2006
at $1 billion. Brilliant hails all three men. “Regardless of what you think of capitalism,
and the history of imperialism and adventurism, there is a new breed of capitalists
who believe that with great power comes great responsibility—and that’s a big deal.”

What sets Google.org apart from most other charities is its for-profit status. Only
a small portion of the philanthropy, the Google Foundation, operates as a routine
nonprofit, with a $90 million endowment. The rest of the philanthropy is free to launch
start-up companies, undertake partnerships with venture capitalists, and even lobby
Congress—so long as these activities are consistent with the charity’s larger goals:
to lessen the divide between rich and poor, improve health worldwide, and end global
warming.

Any Google.org venture that shows a profit must pay taxes, but the tradeoff, Page
and Brin believe, is that their philanthropy will have greater range and flexibility
than others and can thus pursue unorthodox solutions to the world’s gravest problems.

For example, the New York Times reported in September that Google.org is working to
develop an ultra-fuel-efficient plug-in hybrid car engine that runs on ethanol, electricity,
and gas. “The goal of the project is to reduce dependence on oil while alleviating
the effects of global warming,” the Times wrote.

Brilliant expects that some of Google.org’s investments, particularly projects in
the area of climate control, will be profitable—in part because without the need to
show a financial profit, such projects may have a competitive edge. But any money
the organization makes will go back into more projects, Brilliant says. “And I think
that’s what the founders want—they want to see if we can’t stretch this money that
we have by putting it to work to make more money and to do good at the same time.
And you know sometimes you get lucky. But that can’t be your primary purpose. Your
primary purpose is to stop the climate crisis and stop the increasing disparity between
rich and poor and to stop the abject horror of poverty.”

He’s adamant that simply giving money away—conventional charity—cannot change the
world, and changing the world is what Larry Brilliant is about. He uses the term “social
entrepreneur” to describe himself and his ilk, people who are using capital to make
money that leads to social good. The most effective global philanthropy, Brilliant
insists, is to “build self-sustaining, self-relying institutions in the developing
countries that will create jobs and give a service.”

In another project, Brilliant is working to develop an early response and detection
system for global threats, including infectious diseases, natural disasters, famine,
and human rights violations. The vision for this system was inspired by a Canadian-based
surveillance system first developed in 1997. The Global Public Health Information
Network, or GPHIN, now scans the equivalent of 20,000 online newspapers a day, in
seven languages, searching for clusters of information anywhere in the world that
might indicate an infectious-disease outbreak, natural disaster, food-borne illness,
or other threat to the public’s health. The system spotted the first glimmering of
SARS four months before the disease hit full-force, and that information helped contain
the outbreak when it occurred.

Earlier this year, Brilliant identified an enhanced global early detection and response
system as his “wish” when he received the TED Prize, an award given by leaders of
the technology and entertainment industries at their annual Technology, Entertainment,
and Design conference. Recipients of the prize get $100,000 to apply toward their
“wish” for how to change the world.

In his acceptance speech—which helped persuade the folks at Google that he was their
man—Brilliant stressed the need for a global early detection, early response system.
If not, he warned, health officials won’t have a prayer of combatting a new pandemic
such as avian flu—and it’s virtually certain a major pandemic of some sort will occur
within the next generation or two. When it does, a billion or more people will fall
ill, and “the world as we know it will stop,” he said, lowering his voice and fixing
his gaze on the audience. “There’ll be no airplanes flying. Would you get in an airplane
with 250 people you didn’t know, coughing and sneezing, when you know that some of
them might carry a disease that could kill you, for which you had no antivirals or
vaccine?”

Brilliant was too much of an optimist to stop there, however. He reminded his listeners
that miracles do happen: no one believed that smallpox could be eliminated, he said.
But he’d been there, and he’d seen it with his own eyes.

India was the turning point for Larry and Girija Brilliant. Larry talks today of his “35-year love affair” with the country. His friend Ram
Dass, who studied under the same guru, Neem Karoli Baba, says that in India he saw
Larry metamorphose from a pragmatist into an altruist, a hippie into a “spiritual
being. He was so soft and so surrendering to Neem Karoli Baba, and I don’t think I
had seen a person change that way.”

Larry and Girija came back from India in the mid-70s and enrolled in graduate public
health programs at Michigan. It was a homecoming. They’d each grown up in Detroit
and met in high school in their teens. Larry had a medical degree from Wayne State
University, Girija a master’s in psychology from UM. She’d started law school but
abandoned it, and he no longer wanted to practice medicine. Neither had received formal
training in public health, and both now wanted it. India had changed them.

They bought a small house in the small town of Chelsea—it cost less than “remodeling
a bathroom in California now,” Girija laughs—and began a family. By the time Larry
finished his MPH and took a faculty position at SPH, teaching epidemiology, Girija
had completed her master’s in health behavior and health education and begun a doctorate.
SPH Dean Ken Warner, then a faculty member at the school, sat in on one of Brilliant’s
classes and remembers him as “very dynamic, very engaging.”

Both Larry and Girija claim that without Michigan, they wouldn’t be who—or more significantly,
where—they are today. “I don’t think I could have seen a course for myself here at
Google if I’d gone to a school of public health that was part of a medical school,”
Larry says. “Michigan is rooted in economics, management, and the social sciences.”

One-third of his Google.org job is economic development, he points out. “Thank God
I had Ken Warner, who taught me economics.” Brilliant says he’s also indebted to Michigan
faculty members Bob Grosse, Jan de Vries, Oscar Gish, and Bob Parnes. “As you get
older, you carry around the people who you know you stood on their shoulders, or you
took their ideas and you benefited from them.”

He calls Ann Arbor “a very special place” and notes that the town is “broad enough
to embrace the kind of craziness of the West Coast and the spiritual traditions of
Asia and the rest of the world, but it includes those in an envelope of pragmatism
and good works.” Girija says Michigan—and the Midwest in general—taught them both
the importance of “really valuing excellence in what you do.”

One snowy day in December 1978, the Brilliants convened a gathering of like-minded colleagues at a retreat 25 miles
north of Ann Arbor. They wanted to start something that might replicate the experience
they’d had in India, to create “a community of people who might gain common interest
in service,” Girija remembers. From this gathering a foundation called Seva—a Sanskrit
word meaning “divine work” or “service to God”—was born. Among its founders were several
members of the SPH community and a visionary surgeon named Dr. G. Venkataswamy, who’d
started an eye hospital in India and pioneered a prevention and treatment program
for blindness. Dr. V helped convince everyone that Seva’s primary focus should be
blindness. The foundation opened its first office in the Brilliants’ converted garage
in Chelsea and later moved into basement space at SPH.

Twenty-eight years later, Seva has helped fund two and a half million eye operations
worldwide, most of them sight-giving cataract surgeries. Ten times that number of
people have had eye exams and other sight-restoring interventions, thanks to Seva.
Now located in a shady square in downtown Berkeley, California, where it’s surrounded
by trendy shops, Seva has broadened its mission and, in addition to blindness prevention
and treatment work, helps indigenous communities in Central America combat poverty
and injustice and gives support to Native American communities across the U.S.

Seva’s approach is quintessential Larry Brilliant: “To build partnerships that respond
to locally defined problems with culturally sustainable solutions.” Although he’s
currently on leave from the Seva board, Girija continues to be active with the foundation,
and both have been a key part of its success.

Back in 1978, Larry secured a $10,000 gift from Apple founder Steve Jobs to help launch
Seva. To help keep it going in the 80s and 90s, Brilliant started a handful of high-tech
companies and venture-backed start-ups and staged rock concerts with friends like
the Grateful Dead. Earlier this year, Brilliant got Google.com to pledge $1 million
a year for the next two years so that Seva can expand its activities.

“Larry is a consummate wheeler and dealer,” says SPH alum David Green, who’s worked
with Seva over the years, “and when he does it for the social realm, it’s all to good
effect.”

Last year, Green won a MacArthur award for his efforts to produce low-cost intraocular
lenses and opthalmic sutures for eye patients in the developing world —work he says
grew directly from his involvement with Seva as an employee.

SPH alum and founding Seva member Suzanne Gilbert, who directs the foundation’s Center
for Innovation in Eye Care, says Larry’s personality has shaped Seva from the start.
“He’s a relationship builder. Larry really does bring together many different worlds.”

As he flies from California to remote corners of the globe and back, or drives from his Mill Valley home to Mountain View, Brilliant is still building
relationships, often by cell phone. But the village leaders and community organizers
he once dealt with have given way to ministers of health and major foundation directors—with
whom, incidentally, he plans to collaborate on strategic projects.

Brilliant himself has and has not changed. He remains devoted to the developing world
and goes back to work in it “as much as I possibly can.” He’s equally happy working
in Silicon Valley, “especially since Google is a thousand times more successful than
either of my piddly little high-tech startups.” He’s addicted to golf. He still loves
gadgets, the higher the tech, the better.

When he thinks back to his hippie days, Brilliant says he’s both proud and chagrined.
“I am so proud of the values of oneness, and globalness, and inclusiveness, and respect
for all religions and all spiritual traditions, and women’s rights and freedom and
civil rights and anti-war consciousness that are contained within that term ‘hippie,’”
he says. “And I’m so embarrassed by the licentiousness and over-the-top hedonism,
and lack of seriousness of purpose and follow-through, all of which are carried by
that word ‘hippie.’ I mean, that poor little word has an awful lot of baggage, both
good and bad. But overall I’m more proud than sad.”

He and Girija have never relinquished their hippie values—they merely reconfigured
them for a new age. She’s taken up yoga and continues to meditate.

And Larry?

Girija laughs. “Work is his meditation. I think that’s what he would tell you.”

Story by Leslie Stainton; photo by Peter Smith.

Send correspondence about this or any Findings article to the editor at sph.findings@umich.edu.
You will be contacted if your letter is considered for publication.

Girija Brilliant, M.P.H. '77, and Larry Brilliant, M.P.H. '77.

Web Exclusive

Watch video of Larry Brilliant's "wish for the world": to build a global system that detects each new disease or disaster as it emerges
or occurs. (Recorded in February 2006 at the TEDPrize Awards in Monterey, CA. Duration:
26:35)